Breaking Patterns
March 31, 2009 11:12 AM | General
March 31, 2009
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The last four years West Virginia had fallen into an unintentional pattern: sweep its opening conference series and then fade as the season wore on.
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| Junior Chris Enourato leads the team with a 5-0 record and four saves.
Brian Persinger photo |
This year, the Mountaineers are looking to avoid a similar predicament. For just the second time in 13 seasons of Big East play West Virginia swept a conference road series at Connecticut, March 20-22. The following weekend, WVU took two out of three at Villanova.
“We’re really focused. Even the year before I got here they started off really hot and then they fell off,” noted junior right-handed pitcher Chris Enourato.
Heading into this weekend’s three-game series with Georgetown at Hawley Field, the Mountaineers are sitting atop the Big East standings with a 5-1 record – unfamiliar territory for a West Virginia baseball program that last advanced to NCAA Tournament play in 1996.
“We are real determined this year. Winning on the road was a goal for us because last year we won just three games on the road and that really killed us,” said Enourato. “We had a good team last year and the older guys on this team are really determined to keep us focused.”
West Virginia (18-6) has been winning mainly because it has been outscoring teams. Twenty times in 24 games this year the Mountaineers have had 10 or more hits and 12 times they have scored 10 or more runs. Eight of the nine hitters in West Virginia’s lineup are batting better than .300 with four hitting better than .400.
However, baseball is and always will be a game of pitching match ups. Great offense can only take a team so far.
“You have to have mature, tough, strike-throwers on the mound that are going to go out there and compete for you and that’s been the big difference up to this point,” said West Virginia coach Greg Van Zant. “The pitchers we have put out on the mound have attacked on the road instead of being tentative and sitting there waiting on the other team to come back on us.”
All-American shortstop Jedd Gyorko is the team’s best player, catcher Tobias Streich has perhaps the team’s highest ceiling regarding a professional career, but it is Chris Enourato who is performing the most valuable task - getting the last six outs of every game.
“I just try to go out there and attack and be aggressive and get ahead of hitters,” Enourato said. “If I get two strikes I’m going to try and put them away with a slider.”
Enourato’s bread and butter pitch is a hard slider that sharply breaks away from right-handed hitters. The Bridgeport resident has been directly involved in half of West Virginia’s 18 victories so far this year (5-0 record while going 4 for 4 in save opportunities). He leads the team with a 1.44 earned run average, and opposing batters are hitting just .170 against him.
“Chris isn’t going to be automatic but he gives you a chance,” Van Zant admitted. “We’re not expecting Chris to be perfect, but he just goes out there and competes every time he’s on the mound.”
Last Sunday, Enourato came in and shut down Villanova to pick up his school-record 15th career save. Earlier in the week, he blanked Kentucky over the remaining 2 1/3 innings to help West Virginia earn its best win of the year.
West Virginia already owns a pair of non-conference victories over SEC teams, having defeated Tennessee earlier in the year in Myrtle Beach.
“We feel like we can compete with anybody,” Enourato said. “Against Tennessee, they threw one of the top five lefties in the country that was a preseason All-American. The guy we faced from Indiana was really good and there were a lot of scouts there to watch him. We scored runs against them, and we feel like we can score runs against anybody.”
That may be true, but the Mountaineers are swimming upstream against an RPI that Van Zant admittedly loathes. He believes the RPI is unfairly weighted toward the southern power conferences that have the benefit of scheduling early-season home games against northern schools.
Despite its sparkling 18-6 record heading into Tuesday’s game against Duquesne, West Virginia’s RPI is just 131. In the 100-plus year history of the WVU baseball program the Mountaineers have never earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, and it looks like West Virginia is going to have to get as many wins as it can to even warrant consideration this year.
“We want to rack as many wins up in the Big East as we can,” Enourato said. “Coach said something like in the past 15 years the first place team in the Big East has always gotten a bid to the NCAA Tournament. That’s where we want to be and I think we can play near the top of the league. We are first right now and that’s where we want to stay.”
What may be separating this year’s West Virginia baseball team from some of the others is its poise, particularly on the mound.
“Jarryd Summers goes out there on Friday and he throws the ball in the strike zone and we now have a legitimate chance to win on Friday,” Enourato said. “Billy (Gross) throws on Sunday and Jon (Jones) - he’s just a freshman - but he doesn’t walk guys and he throws the ball in the strike zone and makes guys swing at it.
“We’ve got guys coming out of the pen throwing strikes and that’s huge.”
If there has been one telling statistic in the past that explains West Virginia’s success - or lack of success - it has been walks allowed. Last year, Mountaineer pitchers issued 243 walks in 56 games for an average of 4.3 per game.
That’s not good.
“That’s all we needed was having guys go out and throw strikes,” Enourato said. “Last year I think we led the Big East in walks. It’s huge in this league. In college baseball if you walk a guy with less than two outs, there is a really high percentage that that walk is going to score.”
West Virginia is going to have to continue to get solid pitching with difficult conference games coming up the next two weekends against Georgetown and St. John’s. Georgetown is not the Georgetown of old, taking two of three from St. John’s last weekend and owning a .500 record in conference play after the first two weeks of the season. And St. John’s is perennially one of the top teams in the league.
“We look forward to playing these next two series at home and really get off on the right foot,” Enourato said. “We want to try and put as much difference between us and .500 as we can – just keep playing hard and letting the pieces fall where they may.”
Enourato said the team has much bigger goals than just making the Big East Tournament this year.
“We think we can play at the top of this league,” he said. “We want to make NCAA Tournament and hopefully we do.”
